Gæslingfjord, England
Helvíti drullukunta!
Iðunn panted as she steadied herself, gripping the cold, crumbling masonry on the side of the church for support. Trollskap. Dark magic. Someone had literally hijacked Michaels’s nervous system, changing his reality. Gróa alone knew how they did it or why, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out. The same reaving was unbalancing her own galdrar, coercing her spells-songs. The Vǫlur were not used to being manipulated.
There was constant fluctuation in the night sky, blue strobing lights framing the towers and chimneys of the Baleworks beyond, the Gap alive with vibrations of energy. There were the now-familiar long, threnodial whistles, as if clouds were a bustling waystation, full of passengers to-ing and fro-ing under the frown of petulant conductors. She had no doubt that something else lurked out there, among the tumbling becks and tawny bracken. A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought. It was time to leave, time to be far away from the nuclear plant and its rivers of clanging weapons.
The warden was asleep now, crumpled untidily in the gabled porch of his charge. She could only imagine what he had seen—consciousness was a bitch at the best of times, but he had been spectacularly ill-equipped for the combination of pharmacology and pheromones she’d unleashed to jailbreak him. She watched the slow rise and fall of his chest, his wobbly chin and sagging jowls, his protruding “Adam’s Apple,” envying the man his repose. The Verðandi were all fastidious with their own sleep hygiene and the protective cloak it gave them. All of the Hinterworlds had varying solar cycles—if you merrily persisted in Midgardian light-dark habits, you’d quickly succumb to chronic fatigue. Travellers often required a modicum of entraining to remain functional.
She picked up her gambanteinn, twirling it like a black baton. It had been a vital tool in conducting the village moot, even if the melody had ultimately been led astray. It was equally useful for prodding people into action.
“Come on, soldier, up and at ’em. Draum-Njörun has you in thrall,” she barked, poking him with the business end. The churchwarden groaned, then began mumbling incoherently, his unconscious mind replaying the past, searching for rhyme and reason.
Iðunn peered past him, winnowing into corners of his mind, consolidating what understanding she could. She wasn’t impressed with what she found. Men like Michaels lived in a memory, his whole world obsessed with history. You didn’t have to be a mind reader to see it: the inhabitants were backward looking, their culture debilitated, in decline. It was as if a great Empire created a map that was so detailed and so large, it outgrew the Empire itself. A map of conceit and hubris, that expanded as the Empire conquered territory. When the Empire collapsed, all that was left was the map, and the people went on living in it, perfecting each and every detail in their imagination while the reality itself crumbled away from disuse. The skalds might say she was behind the veil of tears. Perhaps this world was a twin to hers, separated at birth.
Michaels rolled over and began snoring quietly. Scratch that, she thought. If it was a twin, this one had been raised by eldhúsfífl. The churchwarden had been an easy mark for whoever had caged him.
She tapped him again with the rod, nudging him until his eyes startled open.
“What just happened?” the churchwarden wheezed. He gagged a little, although whether it was a reflex or something of genuine concern, she couldn’t tell. The man’s thoughts felt calloused, his reasoning brittle. He dusted himself down, freeing himself of the crusted snow that had clung to his coat during the tussle, but his knees and back were sodden. Iðunn saw him wince with pain as his shoulder twinged, clearly not used to sudden exertion.
“Difficult to explain. Come. It’s time to leave,” she snapped, gathering what few belongings she had from the fireside. She was moving with purpose, at once concerned and irritated by the unexpected new threat, hoping that momentum would calm her own nerves. The churchwarden kept his eyes downcast, barely noticed her bustling around him.
“Really!” she insisted, shining him her best kjálkagálkn smile.
The man looked up at her, his face puffy with misery and exhaustion. His voice was as plaintive as the sirens in the sky. “Go where? I tried that already.”
Iðunn took a moment to realise what he meant. “You can move freely now,” she said, with as much sympathy as she could muster.
“How did you do… that? Whatever it was. With your magic wand?” Michaels pointed at her gambanteinn.
She smiled genuinely at that. Notwithstanding its unfortunate Kristin connotations of party tricks and story-book wizards, that’s exactly what it was. A vöndr. She used it to point insistently to the road beyond the low brick wall, shifting her stance to suggest that he should follow.
Michaels paused for a moment, as if tongue-tied or struggling to explain himself. “And the snake?” he whispered, as if he dreaded saying the words. So, he’d visualised snakes during his ordeal—that made sense, Iðunn thought. Snakes were used across the North to decorate the houses of the dead. They formed the boundary between life and death. This whole area of Lakeland was a pit of vipers.
“It was just like the ones on the hogbacks,” the man muttered.
Iðunn was keeping time with a tapping foot, trying to limit his scope for chatter. But her companion’s agitation was infectious, and she felt compelled to ask: “Hogbacks?”
“I’d show you, if only I had my key. Everyone assumed they were tombstones—grave markers,” the churchwarden said, gloomily. “But I think they are something else.… There are other examples all round Cumbria, their roofs gripped by muzzled bears. Except our ones. At Gosforth, we have rather a lot of serpents instead…”
He trailed off into his private desolation. The man obviously found comfort playing tour guide, reciting his facts like a cherished catechism. For a moment, she considered dialing up the exocrines. She needed him moving. Iðunn reached down, intending to tug his sleeve, to drag him out of his inertia. But even as she stooped, she realised his question was perfectly valid. Where could they go?
She was stuck listening to stultifying detail about tombs, in a moribund world. It was dead-end in every sense of the phrase. She crouched down to his level, breathing in his despondency.
“You’ve lived here your whole life?” she asked, trying a change of tack.
The churchwarden seemed to rouse himself at that, remembering where he was at last. He began rolling his shoulders like a prize-fighter who’d gone to seed, trying to rub the disbelief out of his eyes with his bloodied knuckles.
“I’m so sorry, what did you say your name was?” the man asked, ponderously, as if he cultivated reserve.
“Iðunn Lind—remember?” In fact, his question caught her off-guard, and she searched him quickly for signs of amnesia, or other degeneration. It didn’t occur to her that he was simply being polite. Gentility wasn’t in the Norse lexicon.
“That’s an, um, unusual name. The Norse goddess of youth?” he said, speculating. “The one with the apples?”
“It’s a name of the álfkunnr, the elf-kindred. You would rather my parents had named me Eve, or Hesperia?” she said, more question than statement, hoping that the explanation might help him connect to their previous conversations. He didn’t bat an eyelid, although she got the distinct impression that he was fixated on her ears.
“People associate ‘north’ with up and ‘south’ with down, but only because the Grikks drew the first maps that way round.” She sighed.
“I’m not sure I follow,” the churchwarden said.
“As soon as you label someone, you change how people perceive them. The passage of the sun, the rejuvenation of spring—all of these things are deeply rooted in my culture. My family name was coined from the great warden tree in my family homestead, Linnagard, when my ancestors first clasped the branch of the life-wise. The trees brought the first men and women to life—and the gods too. Odin’s mother, Bestla, is a wife of the bark; Loki Laufeyjarson was born from the womb of a tree goddess. But the alfar are not dainty fairies frolicking among the bluebells and our gardens are not quite so ornamental as your church estates. The tree is life and it is death; there is beauty and there is terror in her boughs.”
“Yggdrasil—that’s the tree you mean? It’s not just a myth?”
“The hoar-tree is as real to me as your cross is to you. It is the shelter and salvation of every child of the North.”
Iðunn had given lectures on the Great Ash once: her breakout thesis, ahead of its time in many respects, certainly impactful enough to antagonise the Urðr. Now wasn’t the time to discuss comparative theology, but there were parallels in parallel worlds—and she needed something to put a spring in Michaels’s step. She paused in her preaching, looking around at the church and its towering windows of Victorian stained glass, the bright coloured scenes leeched leaden grey by the night.
“The White Christ. He was crucified, died, and rose again in radiance. That is the central pillar of your faith—that the son of god died to atone for your sins. He is the gatekeeper to everlasting life.”
“And your point is?” The churchwarden shuffled round to share her view. Iðunn held up her vöndr for him to see more closely, to see the spirals of the sapling wood and feel their power.
“Our All Father sacrificed himself for knowledge. For magic staves, keys to the Tree of Life itself. Then, as soon as he had them, he flung open the doors and let his offspring find their own path to eternity. Yggdrasil was his own road—the name itself means Odin’s horse. A steed for the ages.”
The rod trembled in her hands, invisibly connected to the vines and branches of the arboreal sentience. The whole horizon began to dance with delight.
“How are you doing that?” the churchwarden said, with a reluctant half-smile.
“Skuggsjá, er, quantum. Róteind and nifteind, root-particles and sister-particles.” Once you understood the intimacies of photosynthesis and the migration of birds, the intricacies of quantum biology were simple, but she didn’t have the language to explain the galdr in Michaels’s plain English. The demonstration would have to suffice to engender a little trust.
“Words are living things, you know, inasmuch as they are our interface with reality. It stands to reason that the words we choose as labels have power. Your own name, Michaels—a popular name, from what I can gather, so common as to be innocuous. In the past, it had altogether much more impact. It was the name of an archangel, the marshall of the armies of God, the Prince of the last and lowest choir, the trumpeter who heralds the second coming. When Miklagard fell, there were no less than fifteen churches dedicated to the warrior saint. But change it to Mikjáll or Miguel or any of its variants, and it sounds alien. Off-putting. A rós by any other name would still smell as sweet, but still you insist on only seeing the þorn. Michaels is an upright member of the local parish, Miguel is…”
“I see your point,” said Michaels, looking squeamish.
“What you, Herra Michaels, call magic is no more than persuasion. Convincing people to think how you want them to think, to see what you want them to see. Enchanters unveil the choices ahead, the charmed suppose they are choosing of their own volition. Names deliver that power instantly.”
Iðunn stabbed at a loose plastic bag that had billeted in the doorway, holding it aloft with the end of her wand. A drifter, roving unwanted and unloved, over the hills and downs. SPAR, blazed the logo, ringed by a small green fir tree. “Binding and branding. One and the same,” she seethed, appalled at the corruption. “Someone was keeping you right where they wanted you.” She was reminded of their predicament. “Frozen out, trapped in the doldrums of Vindrskali. Do you have any idea why?”
“Windscale, you mean? Sinister bloody name. It’s not called that anymore. They changed it years back, to the much more hopeful Sellafield, as if that would clean up the nuclear dustbin of the world.”
Either the man hadn’t heard her, or he had chosen not to. He seemed content to sit and wait, a contradictory bundle of neurosis and staunch indifference. She probed a little deeper, unpacking the residence of his mind, rooting through his untidy neurons. Round and round she went, feeling his knotted stomach and ransacked self-regard, the fragments of mental fortitude. Iðunn realized she’d have to tread lightly to get sense out of him.
There was a startling bang, an ominous, rolling thunder in defiance of the clear sky, accompanied by the strident squeal of horses. Iðunn heard the commotion before the warden and took a couple of hesitant steps toward the lych-gate before he looked up. She could see better past the treeline to the road from the new vantage, and watched a while, half expecting to see Hermóðr riding Sleipnir across the golden Gjöll bridge. Seconds later, a large metal wain roared into view, emblazoned with Einherjar recruitment propaganda, a bearded warrior yelling furiously from its window. It sped up to the gate, then squealed to a sudden and abrupt halt.
“What are you doing? Get in!” the man screamed, his face coronary red. The wain’s rear doors flew open, thumping heavily against the fleet markings on its side.
The churchwarden apparently needed no further explanation. He was hotfooting it like a bandy-legged funafugl, suddenly, inexplicably, rejuvenated. Iðunn started after him, puzzled and cautious at first, then quicker, compelled by the insistent honking noise. The machine belched and fumed, visibly blackening the clumped snow piled at the side of the road. She could feel the hedgerow choking.
“Barry!” Michaels shouted, with obvious delight. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes!”
Iðunn recognised the big warrior from the village moot—the man was the living embodiment of a wapentake, evidently still testing his decibel range by gargling with rage. There was a third man, cloaked and hooded like a Skuld meistari. He wore a white name tag, on which was scrawled “HUGH” in uniform letters. She clambered into the back of the wagon, following the churchwarden. It was obviously military issue, although the weapons in the racks seemed oddly antiquated or else purely ceremonial. There were two flip-up jump seats bolted onto the bare metal. Oil spread in a prismatic puddle near her feet, making her gag with its acrid smell.
Barry put two mailed hands on the steering wheel and began impatiently cycling the engine. “Put your bloody seatbelt on! Sauntering out of the church without a care in the world. Never mind the bloody whole world has gone to hell in a handbag!” he glowered, accusingly.
“Give me a second, why don’t you!” Michaels retorted, flustered. Iðunn watched him fighting to put a large axe into its binding before the vehicle sped off. Dealing with one of the Gæslingfjord men had been challenging enough. She wasn’t relishing contending with three of them in cramped quarters. Both the driver and the passenger were constantly craning round or checking their mirrors.
Barry’s eyes were frantic goggles. “Hugh, can you see it?” he said, switching gears.
The older man shook his head, then swivelled in his chair to properly scrutinise the churchyard. Michaels finally fastened the axe into place with a relieved sigh. He still looked as surprised as Barry was distracted. The wagon began to careen down the village lane at speed.
“Are the police after you? I thought I heard sirens,” the churchwarden said, glancing quickly at Hugh for confirmation. Barry was busy ranting, throwing barbs over his shoulder in between gunning the controls. The Verðandi decided there was nothing she could or should add to the maelstrom.
The ant-like Hugh scuttled up, his head rotating up from the cover of the passenger seat. “I think you’ve shook it. Hello, Professor,” he said, remembering his manners and Iðunn’s existence at the same time.
“Where is everybody else?” Michaels asked.
Barry looked momentarily grim, then shook his head slowly, continuing his commentary as if nothing had been mentioned.
“It was like déjà vu, but in reverse. That feeling when you’re waiting at home for the missus and hear a door open—see a shadow, even—only to realize that no-one is there. I could feel it in my bones. Minutes later, this black shape appeared out of thin air. Went straight for the boys in blue. Hugh, back me up here?”
“I’d have said you were still three sheets to the wind if I hadn’t seen it myself,” Hugh said, shivering.
Iðunn scratched through their minds for answers. The churchwarden was as incoherent as a stalled cipher, the Skuld inhabited a bizarre, baroque world full of useless ornaments, and the big Viking’s memories were adrift on a sea of alcohol-snapped synapses. None of the men had the precognition talents of the Vǫlur—she would sense them, even if dormant. It was possible that their perceptional fields were still being distorted by the drugs, their neurological signals delayed or misfiring. But that wasn’t it. Something else had crossed over. The impossible beast was dangerously real.
Barry emitted a surprised yelp, instinctively and deftly hammering his pedals and shifting gears. “Fuck! It’s back. What do you think it is, Prof? Something to do with that boundary of yours?”
She stared out of the frosted glass panels in the rear door. Her dual fovea implants magnified the pursuer far more adroitly than the machine’s mirrors, an enormous black form lurching after them.
She recognised it at once for what it was. A hunter—sent to track her down. Trumba certainly had long arms, to reach across the betweenness opening around them. The Verðandi decided to maintain her conceit with the newcomers; folklore and superstition were a convenient mask for the true terror stalking them. There was nothing she could do but offer a distraction.
“An Utburd,” she said, naming her fears. A creature birthed from the soil of a shallow grave and a mother’s shame. They’d been a common enough horror among Kristins, after the Extirpation of the Monasteries. It seemed horribly appropriate: a reflection, designed to mock her, a travesty of the Children she had birthed.
“You say that as if it is an everyday occurrence. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What happened to good old-fashioned English beasties like the Tizzy-Wizzy?”
Barry’s tirade smouldered in the coals of his beard. He drove the engine harder, padding fiercely at the sweat beading on his forehead with an old T-shirt. Michaels filled the silence that followed, quoting whatever he had found on his phone. “A restless dead-child. Children born out of wedlock or to parents who lacked the means to care for them were left to die unbaptised.”
“Using your phone is cheating,” Hugh admonished.
“I’ve never heard of anything so cruel,” Michaels said.
“Because no one spoke of it. She has been denied acceptance, and she’ll find no salvation now,” Iðunn answered the unspoken question, confronting the shards of her past, present and future.
Iðunn watched as the thing thrashed through one hedgerow and scrabbled for purchase on the road. Of course, it hadn’t just appeared unbidden. You had to manufacture nightmares and set them loose—just as she had designed the Jötnar in a lab. She could picture the required shaping—it wasn’t pretty to play around with corpses, but it could be done.
“Well, it’s gaining on us,” Barry said, changing gears again, then swearing as the engine developed a worrying clack-clacking sound. The creature behind them swam up the road, moving with hideous speed. Then, with a bound, it thudded onto the roof. The wagon groaned and slowed under the weight.
The big man wrestled with the wheel, the controls sluggish, trying to shake it loose on the narrow lane. “Any ideas?” he yelled.
“How did you even get yours working? I’ve lost all reception,” Hugh said, trying to snatch Michaels’s phone. The Skuld was apoplectic, as if he had been victim of a ruinous insult. His voice was rasping with what Iðunn assumed was jealousy. She could have sworn the two men were trying to score points off each other, oblivious to the danger lurking overhead.
“We’ve got a man of the cloth here! Sprinkle some holy water on it,” Barry insisted.
“I’m not ordained, Barry,” came the strained reply. “Besides, baptism’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s about becoming one with the Body of Christ, a testimony to our commitment to the Church. It’s symbol of the resurrection.”
“It looks pretty fucking resurrected to me,” Barry wailed, trying to ignore the rhythmic thumping on the roof.
“Why is it after us?” Hugh screamed back.
Iðunn struggled to answer, fighting her own rising sense of panic. The life-wise had been messing around with the warm, wet world of cells for years, tinkering with heredity, using the enigma of enzymes to accelerate biochemical reactions. They had learnt to capture tiny packets of sunlight and hop them unerringly through a forest of chlorophyll molecules, sampling all possible routes at once to find the quickest way. They had even built chemical compasses in the proteins of the eye, sensitive to the orientation of Midgard’s magnetic field. The patterns of paired DNA could be used to tune the flow of electricity as smoothly through the genetic code as through a metal wire, the tethered strands of DNA acting like circuit boards. The hunter would certainly be immune to anything she might throw at it. Adaption was a key part of any custom design. The Outsider would be attuned to her and her alone.
Glancing outside, she thought she recognised the road. It was the old Waingate that ran from Hrafnóss to Ámelsǽtr, through the Harthrknutr Pass. It was a steep and narrow pathway, winding between the fells, famed as one of the most treacherous in the North. The snowfall was deeper here, obscuring the asphalt altogether. A tall wooden sign slipped into view, confirming her guess. Hardknott R. Fort, it read. Ancient Monument. The other passengers had also noticed the heart-stopping bends.
“Barry, this is no good. Too much ice on the road,” Michaels whispered, his eyes fixed on the alarming hairpins ahead.
“Difficult going west, cruel coming east,” Hugh, added, as if quoting from a local guide. Both men clutched the sides of their seats as Barry screeched first one way, then the other, trying to shake the interloper loose, each emitting a low fluctuating moan as they rolled into each turn.
“Go left. To the fort,” Iðunn instructed the driver. She had the beginnings of a plan. If they could scramble up the precipitous rise, she would try use the structure to amplify a protective field—her very own boundary stones. She had a hunch that, whoever it was pulling the strings in Ódáinsakr, they weren’t about to let her fall at the first hurdle.
“The Rath? Why?” Michaels asked.
“The fort predates the advent of Kristindómr. It may provide protection,” she said.
“Have you seen the walls? They are two feet high. It’s a ruin—it couldn’t protect a cubs’ away-day,” the churchwarden howled in derision.
“Walls can be more than stone,” she said, her answer punctuated by hammering on the roof. “I should hurry. Our friend will only become more enraged, until she slices through the metal.”
Barry grinned with relief. “Stone stores story all right!” he roared triumphantly, thumping the roof. Iðunn was briefly concerned he might be goading the creature, and held out her hand to steady him, but the big man was unrepentant. He rolled the steering wheel round and scrunched across the ice and gravel into the tiny parking lot.
“Do we make a run for it?” Michaels whispered, still apparently hanging on for dear life despite the vehicle having already shuddered to standstill. Barry reached past him, pawing in the darkness until he grasped the handle of his long axe. All four remained silent, still-life models for an unfinished frieze.
“Er… no need. It’s buggered off,” Hugh whispered. “Least, as far as I can tell.”
Iðunn cast her mind out, above the vehicle, to see for herself. Hugh was right—the Utburd had given up the ghost.
The Rómar fort was perched like an eyrie, high on a rocky spur. Its dark slate walls dominated the bleak plateau, spreading over what must have been three acres. To the east of the ruin was the remains of a circular bath house, and two heavily buttressed walls that might once have been granaries. Beyond them, an artificially levelled parade ground, where the first light of morning now practiced its manoeuvres with the sheep who dotted the ridge. The woolly generals commanded a spectacular view of the pass below: the scene as stunning as it was remote.
The Rómar had come this far north and sought to defend their borders. It was more built up than Iðunn remembered, reconstituted from the collapsed rubble by the local government perhaps. It seemed somehow fitting that she was penned up here, haunted by her mistakes. On her Midgard, the parallel structure had crumbled away to near nothingness, a reminder of the fate of failed empires. It occurred to her that Útgarð would face a similar end, left to weather on a mountaintop, a memorial to her folly. She searched the horizon for signs of the revenant, wondering what other secrets Trumba had unearthed from the citadel.
Behind her, the three Gæslingfjord men were bickering about whether to call the police again and whose fault it was that they had no video evidence. After a few minutes, the large man signalled some kind of resolution by simply walking away, stomping over the long grass to where she was standing.
“Chin up, Prof! Might never happen,” said Barry, threatening to invade her space with his outsized, outstretched arms. She sidestepped what she could only imagine was a hug, thankful that he’d left his mail brynja in his wagon. “It’s gone then. Your Outbird?” he said, conspiratorially.
“Our nightmares tend to vanish in the cold light of day,” she said, without having the slightest suspicion that it was true. The only reason their assailant would have left is if they were just where it wanted them. She feared the fort was little more than a trap.
“Well, I’m still living mine. I think I’m going to drive down to Barrow Police Station. Take the Wrynose Pass. Nothing else for it. It might make sense if we all went together. Borrow a little of your prescience, so to speak. Can I offer you a ride in Skíðblaðnir?”
Iðunn eyed him suspiciously.
“My van. Just a little joke. It’s big enough for my whole clan to travel aboard with all their war gear and weapons in tow and gets us just where we need to be. It was sold to me by young David Trotter, and he’s only about yay big. So pretty much a dwarf. Of course, it can’t be folded up like cloth and placed in your pocket, but you never know. One day technology might catch up.”
“One day you might not power it with decomposing plants,” Iðunn said, horrified by the whole inefficient mess the vehicle made. The Norse had heat engines, of course, but nothing that required gouging Mother Jörð.
“Hark at Greta Thunberg. Quite right, though. Can’t be helped—have you seen the price of the Ford Transit hybrid? What do you drive, over in Sweden?”
“I don’t.” Iðunn smiled as sweetly as she could manage and tried to step past the man. The last thing she wanted was to tangle with the Lakeland authorities.
“Solar power then, is it? It’s just a problem of energy density, I suppose. A trickle of electrons will work wonders if you can turn on the taps.” He grinned. “So, what do you think? Strange runestones, Northern Lights, people going berserk, Scandinavian demons chasing us out of churchyards. Have you put it together yet?”
“Herra…” she paused, realizing she hadn’t any clue what his surname was, let alone why she was talking to him. “Barry, I’d benefit from some peace and quiet.”
“Ah, I see. Well, you were the one the Council invited. It’s a bloody mystery and no mistaking.” The large man sniffed and rubbed his hands together to kept warm, then started to stride down the hillside towards the parking lot, bounding from boulder to boulder, yodeling as he went. “Hey, Olaf, fancy a sing-song? Keep the spirits up, eh?” he bellowed. “I love to go a-wandering, Along the mountain track, And as I go, I love to sing, My knapsack on my back.”
The noise was horrendous, so Iðunn walked in the opposite direction, pretending to be admiring the view. She wasn’t sure whether it was a national trait or a religious quirk, but these people seemed to sing whenever there was a crisis. They’d understood the power of the galdar once—they still had words like En-chant-ment and Nightin-gale in their tongue. Trace memories, perhaps, of a time when their Ænglisc was closer to the dansk tunga.
It was then that she realized what had been cooing in her ear all this time. The key to remove Michaels’s binding had been a Kristin song, hiding in plain sight. Who knew what else the mysterious galdr smith had threaded together for them to find?
The churchwarden had taken to lying flat on his back, sheltering from the wind in much the same way as the huddled sheep, fussing over his phone with the older man.
“The song you were singing in the churchyard. How does the rest of it go? Quickly, now,” she urged.
“Jerusalem? Well, it was a poem first, by William Blake—and only set to music during World War I.”
Iðunn gave him a look that clearly imparted just how much she cared, and rather than tempt fate, Michaels began to skip-sing through the words to the hymn.
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills?
“And then? What else?” Iðunn began pacing furiously, conducting the churchwarden’s solo performance with frantic gestures.
Michaels’s head rolled from left to right as he scanned a mental lyric sheet. Hugh joined him, finishing some of the lines and repeating others. It was like a lyrical car-crash.
Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
Iðunn barely waited for him to finish. She reeled away as if she had been shot. “Of course. Hvað þú ert mikið rassgat!” she swore violently. “The dream of paradise regained.”
She was certain now, as certain as if she had carved the charm herself. Michaels looked at her blankly.
“Galdrar are songs, at root. Frequencies and vibrations that form keys. Your gaoler is telling us exactly what he is doing and why. What is the song about?” she asked excitedly, happy to find a key to her own confinement. She’d never had much of an understanding of the Kristin Devil and his own fall from grace, but having spent several days in this benighted world, she had started to discover all kinds of sympathy for him.
“The poem’s theme is linked to the Book of Revelation. The Second Coming. Jesus creating heaven, here in England.” Michaels babbled, preferring to stick to his own safe and secure frames of reference than entertain more Otherworldly thoughts.
“A New Jerusalem,” Hugh added, eager to be helpful.
Now do I see the earth anew, Rise all green from the waves again. Iðunn could picture Angeyja, hear her tremulous cry, standing in the Grove. Her words echoed those of Trumba and her vision of a rebirth. The answer was snared somewhere within the spell-song, she just had to prise it loose. She stepped up to Michaels and seized his shoulders, shrouding their conversation from the ever-curious old Skuld. She wasn’t particularly surprised when the warden failed to register any protest at all.
“I need you to think. Focus. There must have been others who crossed over, before me. Someone who came to your crosses.”
“He was interested in the cross and the hogback tombs. He said there were markers—anchors. I’m sorry, my memory is still… foggy. Why is it important?” Michaels prevaricated.
Iðunn could sense she was close to the heart of the mystery. Michaels was a witness; he had seen her fellow traveller on the Raven Roads, someone well acquainted with death.
“On my world, people look up at a molten sky. A whole hemisphere irradiated beyond repair. The Northern Lights are less a shimmering curtain and more a funeral pall.”
“Wow. I mean, how?!” Michaels wheezed, awestruck.
“A hvellrisi. A supernova. Someone blew up a star. Not the sun—Sol—but enough to lance the atmosphere. The sun was his weapon.”
“Well, look, I am sorry and all that, but isn’t that an Act of God?”
“Spoken like a true believer. No, this had agency. Intention. Your friend with the axe was right about the explosive power of the equation. E=mc2 explains why stars shine, how the trees capture starsong, what transpires inside black holes.” Iðunn couldn’t prove that the gods didn’t exist, but science made them entirely unnecessary.
Michaels’s eyes and mouth hung open; his face deflated and wrinkled like an old balloon. “And that’s why you came here? From your Vikingverse?” The end of the world was clearly a lot to digest.
“I didn’t choose to. I’m beginning to think I was summoned. And that the equation on the boundary is an epigram—a calling card left by the summoner.”
Iðunn was convinced of it. Ironically, Michaels had been right all along. The determined prankster with the chisel—someone had carved the runes knowing they would be found. That was the whole point of a grave marker, to commemorate the journey into other lands. But whoever had engraved the equation had wanted it to be discovered, like a thief who couldn’t help but taunt his victims, or an anonymous street artist basking in his own cleverness.
“We should join Barry,” she said, letting go her grip and plotting the quickest path down to the waiting wain. She started to walk down the bluff, the two men scrabbling at her heels.
“Are you sure we won’t get accosted by trolls or giants?” Michaels said, peeping over her shoulder into the bleak dales beyond.
“If we encounter a mob, I’ll hit them with manvelar. Love spells…” she said, realising that she enjoyed tormenting the Englishman. He probably imagined her whole world was a riot of sex, drugs, and spindles.
“You can do that?” Michaels’s eyes bulged; his whole demeanour was tumescent with concern.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” She winked, sighing through him on the breeze. She wasn’t too old to have fun after all. She felt quite exhilarated by her swift unravelling of the mystery. Forcing the conversation was helping matters.
“Barry’s going to drive down the Wrynose Pass. Completely the wrong direction,” Hugh interjected. “The pass of the raven. Ravn hals became Wrynose over the years. The English language is funny like that.”
“What did you…?” Iðunn said. The sentence stalled as realisation crept up on her. “Focus harder. You are the only witness who can identify the vargdropi,” she insisted.
“Mr.… Chandler?” Michaels asked, feeling cautiously for the name on his lips.
She could see him now, a portrait in Michaels’s memory. Indistinct, but clearly a person, somewhere in the wind, rustling through the leaves.
“He had a spear, if I recall correctly,” Michaels offered, meekly. “He looked quite authentic.”
“Gungnir. Made by the Sons of Ivaldi. It never misses its target,” Barry offered, his voice carrying easily, despite the distance between them. He had grabbed a suitable prop out of the back of his van, which he plucked from the ground as they approached. He twirled the spear around his head as if it were as light as Iðunn’s wand.
“Odin began every battle by hurling his spear over the enemy host and crying, ‘Óðinn á yðr alla!—Odin owns all of you!’ The Norse repeated this gesture before every battle, gifting the opposing army to the All Father, in hopes that the sacrifice of the slain would lead to their victory.” The burly Viking strode up to them, a shit-eating grin beaming under his beard.
Iðunn stared at him in disbelief.
“Looks like things have moved on. Sacrificing whole worlds eh? So, instead of Professor Plum in the Dining Room with the Candlestick—it’s Odin in Proxima Centauri with the Gamma Ray Burst,” Barry said.
For a brief moment his form slipped away, a mummer’s guise cast off at the end of a play, revealing the greasepaint and glue underneath. The man underneath was older and leaner, with a hungry glint in his eye. Iðunn sucked in her breath, impressed by the boundless depth of the disguise. She hadn’t even had a glimpse of what lay underneath the muddled antics. The costume was a stroke of genius, the perfect concealment. She noticed that Michaels had instantly stuttered back up the hill in a blind panic born of recognition. He was already vaulting the fort wall, far, far away from his “Mr. Chandler.” Hugh had been less circumspect, and was now simply inactive, paused mid-motion like a store mannequin, the creases of his face pursing around the unrequited question on his lips.
“Smells like a setup to me. The whole reason to lodge here was to escape Ragnarök, not trigger it,” the warrior said, tapping his nose.
“Who are you?” Iðunn asked, terrified that she already knew the answer.
The old bear tossed the spear back into his wagon and clanged the doors shut.
“Who am I indeed? I have dispensed with names. Are we not just histories of ourselves, memories soldered together, scattered across time? I am the soils of my farm, the strings of my harp, the scent of tallow, the curse of the Skuld. I am the one who planted the seed, and the reason for the raven’s flight.”
The man was as old as ice and flint, and as brilliant as the new dawn. Iðunn could barely watch as he strode toward her. Her faculties lulled into ancient sleep, she tottered on the edge of drowsiness. He reached out a long, slow forefinger and touched her head. His voice was the mead of poetry, drenched with honey.
“We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimetres behind our eyes. But you know that better than most, álfadóttir. Reality is formed only by memory. You have helped restore mine.”
The Kristin song, the rescue from the Grove—why? Iðunn asked, probing at the ineffable only to be immediately repulsed. She was as powerless as if struck with sleep-thorn.
“Accustomed to a more pleasant abode? The World Tree needs a world-class surgeon. You wanted evidence, did you not? You wanted to hold someone to account?”
Iðunn didn’t reply. She found she could no longer utter a word. Tears trickled from her eyes as she struggled to come to terms with what she was witnessing. The man watched her face, scrutinizing her as if she were a half-finished statue, and he was holding his chisel aloft, planning his next subtraction from her form.
“No need for tears. We are all prisoners of our own artifice, caged by our own plans. I had a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom. And I could make people believe in my dreams. All too well, it would appear. I have been both jailed and jailer in this, my starry mound. I can see the Urðr have a lot to answer for,” he said. He walked back to his wagon and climbed into the driver’s seat. Iðunn noticed the engine had been idling all this time.
“Night is the time for new counsels. Have a care for Old Worm’s Bane,” he said, gesturing towards the retreating churchwarden. “He might well prove your star witness.”
The wain stretched and skewed, as if in a loom for folding the sea. The radio began to blare through the open windows. The old man waved, one hand high, as the vehicle rolled onto the Raven Roads and vanished from sight.
Iðunn regained the use of her limbs—and her vocal cords. She was just about to swear, when she noticed the whole empire had assembled the parade ground and was marching straight toward her.